HORNETS' NEST (1970: Dir. Phil Karlson)
If Roger Corman's The Secret Invasion was the low-rent version of The Guns of Navarone, then Phil Karlson's Hornet's Nest was the juvenile take on the same material. Instead of hard-bitten men, this time the commandos are a group of Italian war orphans trained by American officer Rock Hudson to destroy a dam in Northern Italy, strategic to the occupying German army. They may be young boys, but their hand to mouth existence has made them into fairly ruthless adversaries, as mustachioed Rock and winsome Aryan doctor Sylva Koscina soon discover. Director Phil Karlson (Walking Tall, The Phenix City Story) was a specialist in violent realism, and he didn't pull any punches in dramatizing the sometimes grueling details of this coming-of-age-in-war drama, eliciting particularly emotive performances from the adult stars as well as the formative supporting cast. Save for some glaringly Seventies haircuts, all of the technical credits for this Italian-American co-production are above par, with special praise for Ennio Morricone's memorably mournful score, and the plentiful pyrotechnic effects by Paul (The Rat Patrol) Pollard. Less ambitious than its genre predecessors, Hornet's Nest is a modest but successful attempt to ring the changes of the impossible mission formula. DVD & BLU-RAY
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